I am telling my Democratic friends that instead of whining about the popular vote or talking about resisting Trump in general the Democrats should develop a spine and actually stand for something. If they had had a compelling message for the working class they could easily have won this election.
> If they had had a compelling message for the working class they could easily have won this election.
So increasing minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, universal health care, protecting/expanding social security, and a bunch of other policies that would help the working class don't count?
The thing is policy doesn't matter. People want 140 characters that make them feel good even if it's bad policy.
There are more people working for "Wallstreet" in New York (461k) than there are people employed in VT (360k). So yes, a senator from NY will be more in bed with "wallstreet" than someone from VT.
I'm calling BS on this. Representing the interests of New York is _not_ what she was criticized for. It was for booking $600,000 "public" (ironic, it was private and secret) speaking events at Goldman Sachs, and such.
At risk of talking politics, for example, she spoke against Sanders plan on universal health care at an important point in the race [1]. If she later changed her stance to be for universal health care, I don't think people either realized it or believed it - basically she needed to commit to it strongly enough so that it would be politically hard to flop after winning and not do it (to gain the voters who cared about that). Fwiw, it sounds like she is now running for NY governor, hopefully she wins that.
Completely. Bernie had plenty of clear, inspiring, resonant policy positions that anyone who heard them can recall. The only thing most people remember from Hillary's campaign was "I'm with her". Trump's response was "I'm with you" or "I'm your voice" or whatever. I mean, how incredibly incompetent is your campaign if you sound more narcissistic than a reality TV troll?
I don't think people had faith that these issues were actually what the Dems wanted to go after if they'd have won. Many of these only became talking points for the establishment once it became apparent that Bernie was a threat to them.
It's definitely fair to say a large share of Trump voters went with their emotions as you said, but I think a lot of folks didn't believe Hillary would enact a progressive policy. If you look back to when she established herself as a politician in the 90s-00s (I'm being generous here), most of those issues were not what she was championing.
To someone that doesn't vote with their lizard brain, it's clear that establishment Dems have the wealthy as their #1, just like the GOP. That's the problem.
> but I think a lot of folks didn't believe Hillary would enact a progressive policy.
Maybe a lot of liberal folks thought that. I think there were many Trump voters who assumed that she would and they didn't want to see the country go further in that direction, and some of those voters would have preferred staying home to voting for Trump if they thought it wasn't necessary to vote for Trump to stop the country going further left.
This might fall under "lizard-brain" but you can see it in the kind of more-apocalyptic-than-usual rhetoric many people were using, e.g. "this is the Flight 93 election!!!" People saying that sort of crap aren't going to be feeling the Bern.
I was a reluctant Trump voter. I didn't so much vote for Trump as against Hillary.
I wouldn't have voted for Bernie either but I would have been more likely to follow my initial desire to case a protest vote for a third party candidate.
>If you look back to when she established herself as a politician in the 90s-00s (I'm being generous here), most of those issues were not what she was championing.
"increasing minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, universal health care, protecting/expanding social security, and a bunch of other policies"
Despite what every source of 'truth' that you have self selected has trained you to believe, we don't actually want more bennies. Subsisting on the bennies you decide you can afford for us is not our aspiration.
So increasing minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, universal health care, protecting/expanding social security, and a bunch of other policies that would help the working class don't count?
To be honest, no. Those don't count because most of the people who consider themselves to be the "working class" would be hurt by several of them.
A skilled tradesman who is making the equivalent of $25/hr doesn't want the minimum wage to go up. If it does, it dilutes his buying power. His wage isn't going to magically increase by $8.00/hr.
Unions have done themselves a huge disservice, by alienating the people who are not members but still have to work with them.
The ACA has turned off a lot of people from the idea of government managed health insurance. Many people, myself included, saw the quality of their coverage decrease because of the ACA.
> The ACA has turned off a lot of people from the idea of government managed health insurance. Many people, myself included, saw the quality of their coverage decrease because of the ACA.
It's weird how true this is. The ACA is the one thing that has accomplished the following : there was public talk on the streets about how democrats/Obama suck several times due to the ACA :
the two weeks when employer contribution became effective
then when the plans got changed in California and people had to choose
and finally when the plans were adjusted
In a lot of other places the employer mandate (which cause quite a few people to lose their jobs because their employer was forced to fire them, esp. in small businesses) mattered more. But Obamacare and the incredible cost increases it brought for everyone should be looked at as a failure.
Dems need to eject their tammany-hall-esque party leadership. It was blatantly obvious the dem on the street wanted Bernie but Wasserman-Schultz ignored her constituents.
It was not blatantly obvious. I voted for Bernie in the primaries, but let's be clear. Clinton won the primaries by millions of votes. If more states had primaries instead of caucuses Clinton would have won even more states.
The DNC excluded independent voters in several states during primaries, independent voters they needed to win the general.
The voters she won in the primary were not the voters she needed to win. Oops.
EDIT: @akhilcacharya: Why expect independents to vote for your candidate if the party doesn't give them a say in the nominee? You want your cake and eating it too, and hence, you lose.
In general, because that is the ballot process many states use.
Personally I'd prefer the ballot process to be completely based on petitions, with parties having no direct role (they would of course endorse candidates; that endorsement shouldn't change the names that appear on ballots).
>Why expect independents to vote for your candidate if the party doesn't give them a say in the nominee? You want your cake and eating it too, and hence, you lose
If they want a say, they are free to register with a party to do so.
That's how you get 8 years of Trump. As a socialist democrat, I'm more than willing to watch the old guard slowly burn. Everyone dies of old age eventually.
Hillary Clinton is 69, female life expectancy is 78. Maybe not waste those 7 years not ruining America further for vanity?
That's a different issue. The parent comment was, "It was blatantly obvious the dem on the street wanted Bernie". Clinton won millions more votes from the "dems on the street" than Bernie.
I think this argument is also misleading in a variety of ways. The election cycle proved, to me, that the entire presidential race -- from primaries to general -- is largely a popularity contest and heavily run on name recognition. There's also the concern that the states that didn't even go to Clinton in the general were largely the ones that carried her in the primaries. And then there's the superdelegate system that allowed the media to push the narrative that Clinton was winning by an insurmountable margin before that was actually the case.
People who generally stayed out of politics and were largely unenthused about voting turned out to vote for a candidate who engaged with their concerns and ideologies. This was a really complicated election cycle that, (again) to me, highlighted the idea that this is all one big popularity contest and that, ultimately, the media picked the popular kids for us all before we knew it.
"Ignored" is putting it charitably. Ignoring is when you don't listen, and just go on with what you're doing. When you react to Sanders as a threat and torpedo him with dirty politics, that's something else.
The anti-Semitism included in that initiative, plus the xenophobia of blaming the Russians for exposing the truth (which I don't think they had anything to do with), sounds a lot like a certain other major political party we're familiar with. No wonder these people don't like Bernie... they're not Democrats and he is.
They have a compelling message for the working class. It's a message of contempt and hate. The long marriage of the working class and Democrats has ended and it wasn't the working class that walked out the door. The Democrats are down to the comfortable professional class preening its "values" and a coalition of grievance groups. Everyone else is on the other side pulling back on the stick to stop the dive before we run out of altitude.
how about bringing back manufacturing jobs for a start? how about deregulation so employers can hire more people? how about lowering taxes? how about enforcing legal immigration so that working class people stand a chance of getting a job?
> how about bringing back manufacturing jobs for a start?
This isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, though there are attempts to try[0]. America doesn't have the infrastructure to bring back manufacturing things like the iPhone[1].
> how about deregulation so employers can hire more people?
Deregulation of what exactly? What's the regulation that's prohibiting "hiring more people"?
> how about lowering taxes?
On who/what? Citizens? Corporations? What's fair? How do you increase military spending, then, if you lower taxes and are already slashing other budgets? [2]
> how about enforcing legal immigration so that working class people stand a chance of getting a job?
Can you provide examples of un-enforcement? As I understand it, most illegal immigration comes from people who immigrate legally on a green card that expires and just don't leave.[3]
This is almost the exact response I expected. You had a chance to inform someone on your position and instead you chose to personally attack their intelligence as though they were beneath you. This is the route an angry child would likely have chosen, is it not?
Everyone that reads your response will likely assume that you didn't have anything to back up your ill-informed position on the matter. Having seen this frequently on the internet, I wonder if this is the reason your account is new.
I'm a little disappointed in the response, myself. I had hoped to diffuse the tension in the tone and simultaneously get insight into the perspective, though neither seemed to happened.
This, unfortunately, leads me to wonder if people with such hostile perspectives are too proud to ever concede an argument (and thus admit they are wrong) or if they consider their understanding too superior and complex to explain to others if they don't already "get it". Both of which are signs of serious arrogance.
How do we, as a society, move past these internal walls that keeps us from having meaningful dialogue?
I have yet to see any sensible answers to these questions which I, too, have asked a few people. Judging by the tone in which the original statements were posed, I do not expect today to be any different.
Also, a green card doesn't really expire, people overstay travel and work permits. A green card is for immigrants that have permanent permission to stay.
Immigration policy certainly has lots of discretionary enforcement. DACA is a big example. I think it's reasonable and the right thing to do, but it is discretionary enforcement of immigration law.
Thanks for that! I wonder if that's better solved by more logical regulation rather than deregulation.
You're right, my use of green card is incorrect -- it's visa. Green cards do expire, though, after 10 years if I'm remembering correctly (it almost happened to me).
I just looked up DACA, thanks for pointing that out. Am I misreading it on Wikipedia?[0] It doesn't seem very discretionary from that second paragraph of requirements and guidelines. That seems pretty concrete.
Repealing the ACA and cutting taxes is pretty well in keeping with stated Republican goals (one of the stopping blocks they have for their repeal is the group of conservatives that think it leaves too much government in the insurance system).
DACA is discretionary in the sense that the government has information that the registrants are not following a regular immigration process and still is not deporting them. "Deferred action" is discretionary enforcement.
I will try to represent the opposing viewpoint here, since you ask a lot of questions.
> This isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, though there are attempts to try[0]. America doesn't have the infrastructure to bring back manufacturing things like the iPhone[1].
So your message to flyover America is to just give up ? Good luck with that. This is a problem. It needs a solution. Let's stop complaining about how it's unsolvable and change it.
And let's face facts here : an import tariff on everything (like every country except the US has, mostly) will help. Finding policies that will help do this is pretty easy.
There needs to be a solution for jobs and economic activity in flyover America. A solution different from calling them white trash racists and abandoning them.
> Deregulation of what exactly? What's the regulation that's prohibiting "hiring more people"?
Are you joking ? Let's take everyone's favorite regulation : the ACA. The ACA is making it much more expensive to hire more people, and thereby preventing people getting hired to a certain extent. Raising minimum wage, same thing.
> On who/what? Citizens? Corporations? What's fair? How do you increase military spending, then, if you lower taxes and are already slashing other budgets?
You slash other budgets more.
> Can you provide examples of un-enforcement? As I understand it, most illegal immigration comes from people who immigrate legally on a green card that expires and just don't leave.[3]
Some 12 million immigrants are illegal aliens. That's half a percent of the population, and 12 million enforcement failures. Furthermore, legal immigration can be reduced as well.
Note that this isn't racist, or even anti-immigration. The goal is not to be anti-immigrant. The goal is to protect the status of the working class by lowering supply in the labor market. Despite the unemployment figures (which is really only everyone who lost a job in the past 12 weeks), there is a massive job shortage in many parts of the US.
Will this make cleaning silicon valley toilets more difficult and expensive ? Yes. That's good.
>Note that this isn't racist, or even anti-immigration. The goal is not to be anti-immigrant. The goal is to protect the status of the working class by lowering supply in the labor market. Despite the unemployment figures (which is really only everyone who lost a job in the past 12 weeks), there is a massive job shortage in many parts of the US.
>Will this make cleaning silicon valley toilets more difficult and expensive ? Yes. That's good.
If you were looking to advance the status of the working class as a final goal, there are several other things you would do first before talking about deregulation, immigration overhauls, or austerity. A short list:
* Raise taxes on the rich, and invest the money in infrastructure, schools, and civic life. You want to push up wages, you hire people directly.
* Move from the ACA to single-payer health-care. This reduces expenses on bureaucracy and bullshit all around the economy, frees people to pursue entrepreneurship, and frees people to change jobs -- all good for the working class!
* Shore up Social Security by lifting the contribution cap. People who make $120k/year are not working-class, and they can afford to pay taxes so that the working class can afford to retire in dignity. The more elderly working-class people can retire, the more jobs are freed up.
* Nationalize natural-resource extraction industries, pour the profits into the national coffers, and use those to reduce taxes and increase wages for the working-class people in those industries. This will especially help in industries where competition has pushed wages and prices to near-zero, most employers are conglomerates rather than small proprietorships, but the products remain essential. For example, farming.
* Encourage the formation of worker cooperatives over other forms of business.
* Strengthen labor unions. Revamp the Taft-Hartley Act to bring back the powers organized labor had in the mid-1930s New Deal period. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
* Break up all monopolies and oligopolies. This is a convenient alternative to nationalization.
* Universal overtime pay for everyone who works more than 40 hours/week, no matter their job role. If they work for a living, they get overtime pay.
Your proposals don't sound at all like they're designed to strengthen workers against management and owners. They sound like they're designed to do the opposite: strengthen owners and managers in exploiting labor as cheaply as possible.
> Raise taxes on the rich, and invest the money in infrastructure, schools, and civic life. You want to push up wages, you hire people directly.
Coming from a country with a vastly bigger public sector than the US, allow me to say : no. Thanks. Don't do this. I'm not against public sector jobs, but I am against the government (or large companies supported by the government) taking care of anything that can realistically be done by anyone else.
> Shore up Social Security by lifting the contribution cap. People who make $120k/year are not working-class, and they can afford to pay taxes so that the working class can afford to retire in dignity. The more elderly working-class people can retire, the more jobs are freed up.
The numbers don't work. And the numbers are positively disastrous starting 10 years or so in the future. This is generally true about your raise taxes ideas.
When push comes to shove, money represents value. The only way to provide more goods and services to the elderly is to have everyone work more, produce more. Tax raises cannot affect this, in fact they make it harder.
But it would depend on what tax to raise. I think I'd most like either a direct wealth tax, or a land value tax. With serious punishments for cheating with undeclared wealth or colluding with government to lower land value. Move the tax burden away from labour.
> Strengthen labor unions. Revamp the Taft-Hartley Act to bring back the powers organized labor had in the mid-1930s New Deal period. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
I like the idea of strengthening unions. Sounds like a great idea.
> Break up all monopolies and oligopolies. This is a convenient alternative to nationalization.
Whilst I definitely agree in the case of Comcast, I'm not sure this would work well in general.
> Universal overtime pay for everyone who works more than 40 hours/week, no matter their job role. If they work for a living, they get overtime pay.
Sounds like a good idea, except perhaps that it's too easy to cheat rules like this.
So basically increase the cost of goods for everyone so more people can be employed at a higher wage?
The Immigration you speak of is likely doing more good than bad, what American wants to work a low paying, back breaking job in the fields or in some factory where the second they complain, they are fired?
If someone in establishment media wrote with such contempt for any aggrieved minority in the US, for instance the millions of black Americians that destroy themselves, their families and their communities with drugs, alcohol and aggressive anti-intellectualism, they'd be drummed out of the elite bubble as 'racist.' But you can shit on white trash if you want; the Internet will cite your hate for years when you single out those people.
That is the correct analysis in my view. There was, in fact, an explicit policy decision in the 1970s to realign the Democratic party with the professional class. The party now stands for doctors and lawyers and tax analysts, and the like, well-heeled professionals of all stripes. Basically the 5%. Their ideology is now firmly neo-liberalism, meaning free market liberalism welded to shallow, cynical identity politics, exemplified by Cory Booker and his slimy collaboration with the nutcase Betsy DeVos. Hell, it's looking more and more likely a corporate stalking horse like Booker will end up being the 2020 presidential candidate. Iron law of institutions. It's so depressing.
They'd have to stop pandering to minorities and the lefty elite and get back to their roots. At least their post 70s roots... At one point,
Dems owned the house and Senate
This is a real problem for Democratic Party leadership. Tthe people wanted a populist. So the people got a populist and he just happened to not be a Democrat.
Coming from a country where Sanders' policies are frankly uncontroversial, I wonder if pundits are discounting the effect that Sanders vastly prolonging his campaign after he'd clearly lost has had on whether the DNC wants to give him the time of day. Truth is, guy doesn't seem like much of a team player. This he has in common with Trump, but Trump won. If Trump had lost in the primaries and then the RNC had lost the election, I seriously doubt the RNC would be turning to him right now.
i disagree. Sanders ran a great grassroots campaign and his message resonated with many. Lets remember Bernie had major success in the rustbelt which was key to the presidential election. I believe he really wanted to push his message and what his supporters wanted to the future of the dem party. Had the dem party actually listened to him and aligned with his message, things may have been different.
Someone that is representing a large majority of voters in this country, and not going along with the democratic line.. I call a true patriot. I hope he never becomes a team player.
Although I strongly disagree with a lot of his platform, I still love the guy. You can tell he really cares about the people, and that authenticity gives you the same "oh my god, he might actually get something done" feeling as Trump (where the meaning of "oh my god" varies depending on demographic). Clinton/Kaine are at the other end of the scale, and I think the RNC being more democratic than the DNC is what allowed Trump to eke out a win.
I respect Bernie, and really admire his class and honestly. However I don't agreee with his economic and political ideology. A "hand-out" government would be near disasterious for America. It goes against one of the core principles of being American, the ability and optimism to work your way up without limits. To start a company that can be successful at home and abroad without excess regulation, red-tape, and buracracy.
I don't think you have a full understanding of Bernie's positions.
"It goes against one of the core principles of being American, the ability to work your way up, without limits." is horseshit. Tell that to a child born in the inner-city with a single parent working 2 jobs and a garbage primary education.
There are success stories that start like inner-city with a single parent working 2 jobs quite often. It is possible, very difficult yet possible. Thats the optimism, if you just give people handouts they lose incentive and drive.
> if you just give people handouts they lose incentive and drive
Is there any evidence of this? I see this argument used a lot to dissuade from the "handouts" thing and for not helping people. Don't non-profits technically receive handouts? Aren't grants technically handouts?
A handout, as I understand it, is money given that isn't meant to be paid back. I think a good portion of handouts already exist, it's just easier to justify not giving handouts to people that are societally (or personally) perceived as inferior because it's easy to not empathize with their situation.
"the ability and optimism to work your way up without limits" is absolutely the classic American ideal, but it requires that everyone is given half a chance. If you're too poor to go to college, or can't access treatment for a debilitating illness, or subjected to racist/homophobic/whatever discrimination, you've already lost out on the American dream. Compare the "basic resources required to start working your way up" to Sanders' planned "handouts" and you'll quickly realize they match up very well.
As it happens, I was born in a well-to-do family, given preposterously easy access to education and healthcare, and now make plenty of money in a job that I like doing. And yet I'm still capable of caring, at least ideologically, about the less fortunate. Life isn't fair and perhaps it never will be, but if you don't want it to be fair something is wrong with you.
Larry Ellison was born in Brooklyn, NY to a single mother, Ellison was raised by his aunt and uncle in Chicago who were quite poor. Howard Schultz (Starbucks CEO), Sean John, Oprah Winfey, Jay-Z, do you want me to continue naming people who come from hard positions with little to no money and the inner-city and made it on a grand scale?
I definitely agree with this. I like the guy, seriously genuine and far from corrupt. However, offering "free" anything doesn't solve anything and I don't believe neither he or his supporters can see, nor do they want to see, the bigger picture of such policies.
The Clintonite faction seems truly devoted to the prospect of continuing to lose elections forever. They are nowhere near where the majority of the country is and they have no good ideas.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadSo increasing minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, universal health care, protecting/expanding social security, and a bunch of other policies that would help the working class don't count?
The thing is policy doesn't matter. People want 140 characters that make them feel good even if it's bad policy.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/8/14848636/hil...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/hillary-clinton-single-p...
Policy definitely won't matter if the messenger chooses not to make it part of the message.
It's definitely fair to say a large share of Trump voters went with their emotions as you said, but I think a lot of folks didn't believe Hillary would enact a progressive policy. If you look back to when she established herself as a politician in the 90s-00s (I'm being generous here), most of those issues were not what she was championing.
To someone that doesn't vote with their lizard brain, it's clear that establishment Dems have the wealthy as their #1, just like the GOP. That's the problem.
Maybe a lot of liberal folks thought that. I think there were many Trump voters who assumed that she would and they didn't want to see the country go further in that direction, and some of those voters would have preferred staying home to voting for Trump if they thought it wasn't necessary to vote for Trump to stop the country going further left.
This might fall under "lizard-brain" but you can see it in the kind of more-apocalyptic-than-usual rhetoric many people were using, e.g. "this is the Flight 93 election!!!" People saying that sort of crap aren't going to be feeling the Bern.
I wouldn't have voted for Bernie either but I would have been more likely to follow my initial desire to case a protest vote for a third party candidate.
She pushed Universal Healthcare in 93.
Those are issues that Obama ran on twice...
>but I think a lot of folks didn't believe Hillary would enact a progressive policy.
Did they not realize the alternative?
And then completely failed to enact or really even push (outside of ACA which I acknowledge as an improvement).
> Did they not realize the alternative?
They sure liked her in primary season despite plenty of evidence she was weaker against Trump.
Despite what every source of 'truth' that you have self selected has trained you to believe, we don't actually want more bennies. Subsisting on the bennies you decide you can afford for us is not our aspiration.
What would you consider a "pro-worker" agenda?
To be honest, no. Those don't count because most of the people who consider themselves to be the "working class" would be hurt by several of them.
A skilled tradesman who is making the equivalent of $25/hr doesn't want the minimum wage to go up. If it does, it dilutes his buying power. His wage isn't going to magically increase by $8.00/hr.
Unions have done themselves a huge disservice, by alienating the people who are not members but still have to work with them.
The ACA has turned off a lot of people from the idea of government managed health insurance. Many people, myself included, saw the quality of their coverage decrease because of the ACA.
It's weird how true this is. The ACA is the one thing that has accomplished the following : there was public talk on the streets about how democrats/Obama suck several times due to the ACA :
the two weeks when employer contribution became effective
then when the plans got changed in California and people had to choose
and finally when the plans were adjusted
In a lot of other places the employer mandate (which cause quite a few people to lose their jobs because their employer was forced to fire them, esp. in small businesses) mattered more. But Obamacare and the incredible cost increases it brought for everyone should be looked at as a failure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wikileaks-emails-show-dn...
It is really bizarre. She's said to be an awful politician, yet won the popular vote in '08, and in '16 during the primaries and general.
The voters she won in the primary were not the voters she needed to win. Oops.
EDIT: @akhilcacharya: Why expect independents to vote for your candidate if the party doesn't give them a say in the nominee? You want your cake and eating it too, and hence, you lose.
And after all, progressive candidates like Feingold and Teachout lost by an even bigger margin than Clinton in WI and Faso's district, respectively.
Personally I'd prefer the ballot process to be completely based on petitions, with parties having no direct role (they would of course endorse candidates; that endorsement shouldn't change the names that appear on ballots).
If they want a say, they are free to register with a party to do so.
Hillary Clinton is 69, female life expectancy is 78. Maybe not waste those 7 years not ruining America further for vanity?
78 - 69 = 9, and anyway that may be life expectancy at birth, but at age 69 female life expectancy in the US is 17.1 years.
People who generally stayed out of politics and were largely unenthused about voting turned out to vote for a candidate who engaged with their concerns and ideologies. This was a really complicated election cycle that, (again) to me, highlighted the idea that this is all one big popularity contest and that, ultimately, the media picked the popular kids for us all before we knew it.
The anti-Semitism included in that initiative, plus the xenophobia of blaming the Russians for exposing the truth (which I don't think they had anything to do with), sounds a lot like a certain other major political party we're familiar with. No wonder these people don't like Bernie... they're not Democrats and he is.
They have a compelling message for the working class. It's a message of contempt and hate. The long marriage of the working class and Democrats has ended and it wasn't the working class that walked out the door. The Democrats are down to the comfortable professional class preening its "values" and a coalition of grievance groups. Everyone else is on the other side pulling back on the stick to stop the dive before we run out of altitude.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432796/working-class-wh...
This isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, though there are attempts to try[0]. America doesn't have the infrastructure to bring back manufacturing things like the iPhone[1].
> how about deregulation so employers can hire more people?
Deregulation of what exactly? What's the regulation that's prohibiting "hiring more people"?
> how about lowering taxes?
On who/what? Citizens? Corporations? What's fair? How do you increase military spending, then, if you lower taxes and are already slashing other budgets? [2]
> how about enforcing legal immigration so that working class people stand a chance of getting a job?
Can you provide examples of un-enforcement? As I understand it, most illegal immigration comes from people who immigrate legally on a green card that expires and just don't leave.[3]
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/17/made-in-america-iphones...
[1] http://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20120123/apples-jobs-to-ob... (There are better sources out there)
[2] http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520305293/trump-to-unveil-hard...
[3] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/03/homeland-sec...
Everyone that reads your response will likely assume that you didn't have anything to back up your ill-informed position on the matter. Having seen this frequently on the internet, I wonder if this is the reason your account is new.
This, unfortunately, leads me to wonder if people with such hostile perspectives are too proud to ever concede an argument (and thus admit they are wrong) or if they consider their understanding too superior and complex to explain to others if they don't already "get it". Both of which are signs of serious arrogance.
How do we, as a society, move past these internal walls that keeps us from having meaningful dialogue?
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/questions-...
It's more expensive to have 50 employees than 49.
Also, a green card doesn't really expire, people overstay travel and work permits. A green card is for immigrants that have permanent permission to stay.
Immigration policy certainly has lots of discretionary enforcement. DACA is a big example. I think it's reasonable and the right thing to do, but it is discretionary enforcement of immigration law.
You're right, my use of green card is incorrect -- it's visa. Green cards do expire, though, after 10 years if I'm remembering correctly (it almost happened to me).
I just looked up DACA, thanks for pointing that out. Am I misreading it on Wikipedia?[0] It doesn't seem very discretionary from that second paragraph of requirements and guidelines. That seems pretty concrete.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...
Repealing the ACA and cutting taxes is pretty well in keeping with stated Republican goals (one of the stopping blocks they have for their repeal is the group of conservatives that think it leaves too much government in the insurance system).
DACA is discretionary in the sense that the government has information that the registrants are not following a regular immigration process and still is not deporting them. "Deferred action" is discretionary enforcement.
Not deferring action is also discretionary enforcement, it's just a different choice on how to apply the same discretion.
> This isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, though there are attempts to try[0]. America doesn't have the infrastructure to bring back manufacturing things like the iPhone[1].
So your message to flyover America is to just give up ? Good luck with that. This is a problem. It needs a solution. Let's stop complaining about how it's unsolvable and change it.
And let's face facts here : an import tariff on everything (like every country except the US has, mostly) will help. Finding policies that will help do this is pretty easy.
There needs to be a solution for jobs and economic activity in flyover America. A solution different from calling them white trash racists and abandoning them.
> Deregulation of what exactly? What's the regulation that's prohibiting "hiring more people"?
Are you joking ? Let's take everyone's favorite regulation : the ACA. The ACA is making it much more expensive to hire more people, and thereby preventing people getting hired to a certain extent. Raising minimum wage, same thing.
> On who/what? Citizens? Corporations? What's fair? How do you increase military spending, then, if you lower taxes and are already slashing other budgets?
You slash other budgets more.
> Can you provide examples of un-enforcement? As I understand it, most illegal immigration comes from people who immigrate legally on a green card that expires and just don't leave.[3]
Some 12 million immigrants are illegal aliens. That's half a percent of the population, and 12 million enforcement failures. Furthermore, legal immigration can be reduced as well.
Note that this isn't racist, or even anti-immigration. The goal is not to be anti-immigrant. The goal is to protect the status of the working class by lowering supply in the labor market. Despite the unemployment figures (which is really only everyone who lost a job in the past 12 weeks), there is a massive job shortage in many parts of the US.
Will this make cleaning silicon valley toilets more difficult and expensive ? Yes. That's good.
>Will this make cleaning silicon valley toilets more difficult and expensive ? Yes. That's good.
If you were looking to advance the status of the working class as a final goal, there are several other things you would do first before talking about deregulation, immigration overhauls, or austerity. A short list:
* Raise taxes on the rich, and invest the money in infrastructure, schools, and civic life. You want to push up wages, you hire people directly.
* Move from the ACA to single-payer health-care. This reduces expenses on bureaucracy and bullshit all around the economy, frees people to pursue entrepreneurship, and frees people to change jobs -- all good for the working class!
* Shore up Social Security by lifting the contribution cap. People who make $120k/year are not working-class, and they can afford to pay taxes so that the working class can afford to retire in dignity. The more elderly working-class people can retire, the more jobs are freed up.
* Nationalize natural-resource extraction industries, pour the profits into the national coffers, and use those to reduce taxes and increase wages for the working-class people in those industries. This will especially help in industries where competition has pushed wages and prices to near-zero, most employers are conglomerates rather than small proprietorships, but the products remain essential. For example, farming.
* Encourage the formation of worker cooperatives over other forms of business.
* Strengthen labor unions. Revamp the Taft-Hartley Act to bring back the powers organized labor had in the mid-1930s New Deal period. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
* Break up all monopolies and oligopolies. This is a convenient alternative to nationalization.
* Universal overtime pay for everyone who works more than 40 hours/week, no matter their job role. If they work for a living, they get overtime pay.
Your proposals don't sound at all like they're designed to strengthen workers against management and owners. They sound like they're designed to do the opposite: strengthen owners and managers in exploiting labor as cheaply as possible.
Coming from a country with a vastly bigger public sector than the US, allow me to say : no. Thanks. Don't do this. I'm not against public sector jobs, but I am against the government (or large companies supported by the government) taking care of anything that can realistically be done by anyone else.
> Shore up Social Security by lifting the contribution cap. People who make $120k/year are not working-class, and they can afford to pay taxes so that the working class can afford to retire in dignity. The more elderly working-class people can retire, the more jobs are freed up.
The numbers don't work. And the numbers are positively disastrous starting 10 years or so in the future. This is generally true about your raise taxes ideas.
When push comes to shove, money represents value. The only way to provide more goods and services to the elderly is to have everyone work more, produce more. Tax raises cannot affect this, in fact they make it harder.
But it would depend on what tax to raise. I think I'd most like either a direct wealth tax, or a land value tax. With serious punishments for cheating with undeclared wealth or colluding with government to lower land value. Move the tax burden away from labour.
> Strengthen labor unions. Revamp the Taft-Hartley Act to bring back the powers organized labor had in the mid-1930s New Deal period. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
I like the idea of strengthening unions. Sounds like a great idea.
> Break up all monopolies and oligopolies. This is a convenient alternative to nationalization.
Whilst I definitely agree in the case of Comcast, I'm not sure this would work well in general.
> Universal overtime pay for everyone who works more than 40 hours/week, no matter their job role. If they work for a living, they get overtime pay.
Sounds like a good idea, except perhaps that it's too easy to cheat rules like this.
The Immigration you speak of is likely doing more good than bad, what American wants to work a low paying, back breaking job in the fields or in some factory where the second they complain, they are fired?
Whenever the topic happens to be energy higher costs are offered as proper penance.
How brave.
Someone that is representing a large majority of voters in this country, and not going along with the democratic line.. I call a true patriot. I hope he never becomes a team player.
"It goes against one of the core principles of being American, the ability to work your way up, without limits." is horseshit. Tell that to a child born in the inner-city with a single parent working 2 jobs and a garbage primary education.
Is there any evidence of this? I see this argument used a lot to dissuade from the "handouts" thing and for not helping people. Don't non-profits technically receive handouts? Aren't grants technically handouts?
A handout, as I understand it, is money given that isn't meant to be paid back. I think a good portion of handouts already exist, it's just easier to justify not giving handouts to people that are societally (or personally) perceived as inferior because it's easy to not empathize with their situation.
Can you cite any of these claims? I'd like to understand this a little better.
Kind of like Trump did? Or the current generation of Walton family?
Anyway, I thought this was short and to the point on this subject: https://brightside.me/article/what-you-should-think-about-be...
Yes, please continue. I'd like a large enough sample to dig into.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Gracchus